A guide from Cardiac Rehab’s Hugh Bethell
Keeping well
The most effective way we can protect and enhance our good health is by taking regular exercise. There is no medication which your doctor can give you that is anywhere near as good at keeping you well. Regular physical activity not only reduces the risk of developing all the degenerative diseases of later life, it is also a highly effective treatment for most of them.
How much exercise?
The benefits of physical activity are related to the amount we do – how hard we exercise, how often we do it and how long we keep going. The government has written guidelines – they recommend 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week or 75 minutes off vigorous activity. Questionnaire surveys suggest that between 30% and 50% of the population comply with these guidelines which does not sound too bad. However when the activity of samples of the population are actually measured they fall well short – between 5 and 10% comply. For older people the figures are much lower. This tendency to believe that we are looking after our health rather better than we say we are is known as “social desirability bias”!
Modern disease patterns
Over the past century there has been a complete change in the patterns of disease which kill or disable us. Until well into the 20th century the commoner health scourges which we faced included tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, pneumonia, cholera and a host of other infections. Now these formerly deadly diseases are largely a thing of the past and the main threats to our health and longevity are the degenerative conditions of later life. In contrast to the contagions of yesteryear we are now the victims of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, stroke, and a variety of cancers. Collectively these are known as non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The long term results of all of these NCDs is ill health in later life and the threat of frailty. Frailty is the result of too little exercise and too much sitting which lead to increasing muscular weakness as we age. Add to this the NCDs and the resulting frailty robs us of our mobility, our ability to carry out the activities of daily living and our independence later in life.
The role of exercise
All the NCDs and the resulting frailty are not an inevitable result of ageing – they result from our life-style choices – in this case sitting about too much and moving about too little – and probably enhanced by eating too much food and drinking too much alcohol. NCDs and frailty can be prevented. Nearly all the NCDs are caused or aggravated by a lack of exercise. Moreover nearly all of them can also be treated or improved by taking regular exercise. We should all take action to reduce the chance of developing frailty and being disabled by these debilitating conditions. Taking exercise keeps us physically fit and increases both length of healthy life and total life span.
And it is not only the body which is helped by exercise – the mind and spirit are also beneficiaries. Regular physical activity like walking reduces the risk of depression, dissipates stress, improves feelings of wellbeing and helps to ward off dementia. All of these advantages are also promoted by the social interactions of walking as part of a group. As Juvenal put it “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”
Which exercise should we take?
The Department of Health has recommended that we take at least 30 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise on five days of the week. For most of us the exercise to which we take most easily and with most pleasure is walking. Here is a physical activity which promotes physical fitness with all its benefits, which allows views of the countryside and all its rural beauties, which can be a highly sociable activity and which costs nothing except the occasional pair of shoes. What could be better?
So get out there! Join with others in a group activity which you can enjoy and which can do more good for you than anything else you can think of – Walk for Health!
Walking is something that nearly all of us do, mostly because it is a necessity for daily life. Unlike many exercises, after the age of about 18 months we do not need any teaching to do it. Walking can be done at any intensity (speed) and most of us can do it as often as we like and for long periods if we please.
